David Colarusso

Biography

David Colarusso is the founder and co-director of Suffolk University Law School’s Legal Innovation & Technology (LIT) Lab. An attorney and science educator by training, he has worked as a public defender, data scientist, software developer, writer, and educator. His work focuses on natural language processing and artificial intelligence, legal data standards, document automation, and the use of technology to expand access to justice. In the classroom, he uses real-world projects, games, and simulations to foster learning.

Before entering the legal profession, Colarusso taught high school physics and astronomy for six years, including a year in Edinburgh, Scotland, through a Fulbright Teacher Exchange. While teaching high school, he produced a physics video series that has received more than six million views on YouTube and co-founded a software company that he operated for eight years.

After law school, Colarusso served for six years with the Massachusetts public defender agency, CPCS, first as a staff attorney and later as the agency’s first data scientist. His questions about how institutions collect and use information ultimately led him from courtroom advocacy to developing data-driven tools and methods intended to improve client outcomes.

Colarusso joined Suffolk Law full time in 2017 to establish the LIT Lab, where he works with students, faculty, and community partners to build technologies that improve the delivery of legal services. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Lab developed the Document Assembly Line, an open-source platform for creating guided interviews and automated legal documents.

His lesson Algos, Bias, Due Process, & You provides a good distillation of Colarusso’s teaching, using interactive simulations, collaborative discussion, and role-playing to help students examine automation bias, misleading measures of accuracy, competing definitions of fairness, disparate impacts, and the importance of due process. It reflects his broader emphasis on learning through doing and on understanding that technological systems embody human choices and values.

Colarusso is also the creator of QnA Markup, a programming language designed for lawyers and other subject-matter experts, as well as the “Law RPG method,” a supplement to the traditional case method of legal instruction.

Education

• Boston University School of Law — JD
• Harvard Graduate School of Education — MEd
• Cornell University — BA

Selected Writings

• Algos, Bias, Due Process, & You, Suffolk LIT Blog (2026). A reflection from Colarusso on creating an interactive lesson exploring automation bias, predictive accuracy, machine bias, competing conceptions of fairness, and due process through simulations and collaborative exercises, provided here as a concentrated distillation of his approach to teaching.
• Unsupervised Machine Scoring of Free Response Answers—Validated Against Law School Final Exams, MIT Computational Law Report (2022). Presents and evaluates a method for scoring written responses without pre-labeled model answers by examining relationships among responses in a shared feature space. This work is also the subject of US Patent #12,046,156.
• Digital Curb Cuts: Towards an Inclusive Open Forms Ecosystem, with Quinten Steenhuis, Akron Law Review, Vol. 54 (2021). Examines pandemic-era court innovations implemented at the LIT Lab and argues for an open-source, standards-based ecosystem for legal document and form automation.
• Speaking the Same Language: Data Standards and Disruptive Technologies in the Administration of Justice, with Erika J. Rickard, Suffolk University Law Review, Vol. 50 (2017). Argues that clearly defined judicial data standards can help courts and civic technologists develop better tools for all court users.

Colarusso also writes about legal technology, artificial intelligence, pedagogy, data, and access to justice on his website Sadly Not, Havoc Dinosaur as well as on Suffolk’s LIT Blog.

Selected Projects

• Court Forms Online. A free nonprofit service from the LIT Lab in collaboration with a constellation of non-profits and courts. It guides users through court forms and other legal documents step by step. Users answer plain-language questions, and the service generates completed forms that can be printed, emailed, or, in some cases, filed electronically with the court. See Digital Curb Cuts above.
• The Finite Scroll. An open-source, privacy-conscious RSS reader that gives users control over their feeds and recommendations. It stores reading activity locally and makes the features shaping its personalized feed visible and adjustable. The default feed focus on law and tech issues.
• In Case You Missed It (Law). An automated digest of legal news, scholarship, commentary, and AI research shared across the open web. The project uses open protocols and transparent automation to support discovery beyond conventional social media.
• LIT Prompts. An open-source browser extension for creating reusable AI prompt templates from selected text, webpages, manual input, and saved notes. It supports both cloud-based and locally hosted language models.
• Spot. An AI-powered issue-spotting service that identifies potentially relevant legal needs from a person’s description of a problem. Its standardized classifications can help legal-service organizations connect users with appropriate resources.
• QnA Markup. A programming language designed to help lawyers and other experts create interactive guided interviews without traditional coding experience. It converts structured questions and branching instructions into conversational applications.

More of Colarusso’s projects can be found on Sadly Not, Havoc Dinosaur.

Selected Honors

• ABA Legal Rebel
• Fastcase 50 Honoree
• ABA Award-winning legal hacker
• Fulbright Teacher Exchange participant
• Eagle Scout

Bar Admittance

• Massachusetts, 2011

Learn More

More of Colarusso’s professional projects and experiments can be found at Sadly Not, Havoc Dinosaur. His creative work, including photography and watercolors, appear at DavidColarusso.com.